Obama: The fall
By Charles
Krauthammer
Fate is fickle, power cyclical, and nothing is new under the sun. Especially
in Washington, where after every election the losing party is sagely instructed
to confess sin, rend garments and rethink its principles lest it go the way of
the Whigs. And where the victor is hailed as the new Caesar, facing an open road
to domination.
And where Barack Obama, already naturally inclined to believe his own
loftiness, graciously accepted the kingly crown and proceeded to ride his
reelection success to a crushing victory over the GOP at the fiscal cliff, leaving a humiliated John Boehner
& Co. with nothing but naked tax hikes.
Thus emboldened, Obama turned his inaugural and State of the Union addresses into a left-wing dream
factory, from his declaration of war on global warming (on a planet where
temperatures are the same as 16 years ago and in a country whose CO2 emissions
are at a 20-year low) to the invention of new entitlements — e.g., universal
preschool for 5-year-olds— for a country already drowning in debt.
To realize his dreams, Obama sought to fracture and neutralize the
congressional GOP as a prelude to reclaiming the House in 2014. This would
enable him to fully enact his agenda in the final two years of his presidency,
usually a time of lame-duck paralysis. Hail the Obama juggernaut.
Well, that story — excuse me, narrative — lasted exactly six months. The Big
Mo is gone.
It began with the sequester. Obama never believed the Republicans would call
his bluff and let it go into effect. They did.
Taken by surprise, Obama cried wolf, predicting the end of everything we hold
dear if the sequester was not stopped. It wasn’t. Nothing happened.
Highly embarrassed, and determined to indeed make (bad) things happen, the White House refused Republican offers to
give it more discretion in making cuts. Bureaucrats were instructed to inflict
maximum pain from minimal cuts, as revealed by one memo from the Agriculture
Department demanding agency cuts that the public would feel.
Things began with the near-comical cancellation of White House tours and ended with
not-so-comical airline delays. Obama thought furious passengers would
blame the GOP. But isn’t the executive branch in charge of these agencies? Who
thinks that a government spending $3.6 trillion a year can’t cut 2 percent
without furloughing air-traffic controllers?
Looking not just incompetent at managing budgets but cynical for deliberately
injuring the public welfare, the administration relented. Congress quickly passed a bill giving Obama reallocation
authority to restore air traffic control. Having previously threatened to veto
any such bill, Obama caved. He signed.
Not exactly Appomattox, but coming immediately after Obama’s spectacular defeat on gun control, it marked an
administration that had lost its “juice,” to paraphrase a charming question at
the president’s Tuesday news conference.
For Obama, gun control was a political disaster. He invested capital. He went
on a multi-city tour. He paraded grieving relatives. And got nothing. An
assault-weapons ban — a similar measure had passed the Congress 20 years ago —
lost 60 to 40in a Senate where Democrats control 55 seats.
Obama failed even to get mere background checks.
All this while appearing passive, if not helpless, on the world stage. On Syria, Obama is nervously trying to erase the WMD red
line he had so publicly established. On Benghazi, he stonewalled accusations
that State Department officials wishing to testify are being blocked.
He is even taking heat for the Boston bombings. Every day brings another
revelation of signals missed beforehand. And his post-bombing pledge to hunt
down those responsible was mocked by the scandalous Mirandizing of Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, gratuitously shutting down information from the one person who knows
more than anyone about possible still-existent explosives, associates, trainers,
future plans, etc.
Now, the screw will undoubtedly turn again. If immigration reform passes,
Obama will be hailed as the comeback kid, and a new “Obama rising” narrative
proclaimed.
This will overlook the fact that immigration reform has little to do with
Obama and everything to do with GOP panic about the Hispanic vote. In fact,
Obama has been asked by congressional negotiators to stay away, so polarizing a
figure has he become.
Nonetheless, whatever happens, the screw will surely turn again, if only
because of media boredom. But that’s the one constant of Washington political
life: There are no straight-line graphs. We live from inflection point to
inflection point.
And we’ve just experienced one. From king of the world to dead in the water
in six months. Quite a ride.
